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Music Hackspace 2017

Described as a community for “innovators and hobbyists”, Music Hackspace began in 2011, promoting some of the more tech-heavy approaches to electronic music and sound art. Having relocated from Bethnal Green to a new home in Somerset House Studios in Central London, the group recently announced a new programme of events for 2017, covering artist talks, software classes and synth workshops.

Their opening event is a free talk on March 27, with Antònia Folguera and Look Mum No Computer, a title you will probably recognise if you’ve ever seen this largely ridiculous, partially genius synth-bike on YouTube before.

Following this, there are a number of software classes worth checking out, looking at tools like Max MSP, Supercollider and TidalCycles. Talking you through the latter of these, Conditional Records head Calum Gunn will be in session on April 5 discussing it’s use in the live coding environment. Later in the calendar, TidalCycles designer Alex Mclean aka Yaxu will also be speaking.

Other dates of particular interest include May 3, when Shelly Knotts will be running a session on ‘Making Music With Code’ with open-source audio engine and programming language, Supercollider. On April 22, Tom Richards, whose take on Daphne Oram’s ‘Mini-Oramics’ machine I was lucky enough to see in action at Fort Process last year, will be leading a beginners workshop on the foundations of electronics and synthesis. Over the weekend participants will build a basic synthesiser from scratch, learning how to solder and prototype simple circuits before taking their creations home at the end of the session.

On June 26 there will also be a talk from our repetition-obsessed friends at SM-LL, Martin J Thompson and Lucia H Chung, discussing their approach to production, label management and event curation.